'Portraits 9/11/01:' The New York Times remembers

(CNN) -- As a census reporter for The New York Times, Janny Scott chronicles the living. On September 12, her assignment became the dead.

Twenty-four hours earlier, two hijacked planes had leveled the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and authorities at the time feared as many as 6,000 people had died in the smoldering rubble four miles from Scott's office.

Within three days, the enormity of the task -- chronicling the great many who had perished -- prompted Scott's bosses to change the plan, and they decided to assemble a team of reporters to write about the missing. Like dealing cards from an unlucky deck, editors handed out fliers to the six-person reporting team, fliers from people looking for information about friends or family members.

Over the course of several months, the efforts of the Times team produced almost 2,000 "Portraits of Grief," 200-word vignettes that appeared in the paper each day. Those stories have become the hard-bound profile collection titled "Portraits 9/11/01." The compilation goes on sale May 1, and its profits are slated to help relatives of those who perished.

"There was a feeling inside the building and outside the building that they (the profiles) should become a book," said Mitchell Levitas, editorial director of book development for The New York Times. "Inside the building, there was an emotional commitment to tell those stories. Whether or not it would be a book, we didn't know. But we all hoped so."

'The very heart of these people'

EXTRA INFORMATION CNN in-depth coverage of September 11:   • Gallery: Images of September 11  • September 11: A memorial  • War Against Terror: The victims  • War Against Terror: Day of terror

With three to four paragraphs, members of what grew to a 143-reporter team crafted throat-tightening tales of lives halted abruptly on September 11:

A passerby looks at a memorial outside a firehouse near the World Trade Center where 23 police officers and 343 firefighters were lost September 11.

The daily glimpses into the personal tragedies garnered thousands of letters and e-mails from readers, snagged a Pulitzer Prize for the paper and exposed the writers to an experience like none other.

"It was not the kind of arms-length reporting that reporting usually is," said Scott about interviewing family members. "It was being plunged into the very heart of these people."

'It could be so uplifting'

When coverage started, the editors decided that no one should pull the emotionally taxing duty longer than two weeks at a time. But Times general assignment reporter Lynette Holloway asked to stay on longer. Her first cousin Elizabeth Darling, who worked on the 97th floor of Tower 1, died in the tragedy.

"The idea of communicating with other people who were going through the same thing helped. To hear that I wasn't the only one who was thinking that people were in the basement and that they were OK -- just to know I was not crazy, that they were hoping, too," Holloway said.

Both covered in soot, a police officer helps a pedestrian in New York on September 11.

"It's not like I told everyone I talked to about Liz, just some people. We'd wonder what area of the building they were standing in and hope that they weren't in an elevator and fell," she said. "There was just so much free-floating grief in the air that I found it grounding. It could be so uplifting. When you asked them a question about their loved one, there was such happiness in their voices when they talked."

Levitas said there might be a second edition of the book because the current volume includes the 1,910 profiles published in 2001, and the Times continues to write more each week.

The reporters all agreed that the work made them want to get together and decompress and digest the experience as one, Scott said, but the team -- composed of people from news departments throughout the paper -- was seldom together, and there was never enough time to stop the writing. Interviews averaged about an hour each to gather the anecdote that best described the victim's essence.

"Our goal was to do 10 a day," said Scott. "I got nine done on the first day, and I never got anywhere near that again. And I stayed that day until midnight. ...

"It was exhausting, but I never felt, 'I can't do this anymore.' There was something awe-inspiring about these people's ability to talk at that moment," Scott said. "You felt that you were doing something useful at a time when you desperately needed to feel that way."